Twitter wants to weaken trolls (TWTR)

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Twitter announced it’s going to greater lengths to curb harassment on its platform by tempering the visibility of trolls’ tweets. Beginning this week, Twitter will begin using algorithms to identify accounts that exhibit “troll-like behavior” — for example, repeatedly tweeting or mentioning users who don’t follow accounts back, or using many irrelevant hashtags in tweets. The social company will demote trolls’ tweets in search results and public conversations, which is one of the main ways Twitter users see messages from those they don’t follow.

Clamping down on trolls’ tweets highlights Twitter’s ongoing struggle with policing divisive and spammy content on its platform. Russian trolls used the platform to spread over 200,000 inflammatory tweets in an effort to influence the 2016 US presidential election, for example. And among popular news and current event websites, 66% of tweeted links are shared by suspected bots, according to Pew Research Center.

These figures help explain why only 13% of respondents indicated they believe Twitter is the safest social platform to participate in or post on, according to exclusive data from Business Insider Intelligence’s 2017 Digital Trust Survey.

Demoting trolls’ tweets can make Twitter’s users more comfortable browsing and posting content to the platform. The change means users are less likely to encounter abusive tweets. Because tweets from trolls are buried, users quickly flipping through various conversations on their feeds may not encounter as many tweets from trolls. In testing markets, Twitter’s new approach led to 8% fewer abuse reports from conversations and a 4% drop in abuse reports from search.

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